Is Your State Violating Your Right to Have Your Voting Intent Counted?

If your state uses electronic voting machines with no paper trails, it’s violating your right to have your voting intent counted.

According to Conservative Review, 15 states use touchscreen voting, which could make it difficult to recount votes should problems arise. There is no paper trail of your vote. This kind of voting also could be vulnerable to hacking and improper calibration.

What happened to old-fashioned paper ballots? Can you request a paper ballot?

Brad King, a spokesman for the Indiana Secretary of State, told CR that if paper ballots are available in a jurisdiction that has a Direct Recording Electronic system (DRE),a voter may request a paper ballot. However, the jurisdiction is not required to have those paper ballots on hand, so they “may not have the paper ballot stock available to make this request.” In many other states with voting machines, you must request a vote-by-mail ballot in order to vote by paper.

In many states with voting machines that do not produce a paper trail of each individual voter’s choice, the only evidence available for recounts is the paper tape that is printed with the aggregate vote totals at the end of the night. In Indiana, as Brad King told CR, “An electronic voting system is required by Indiana law to maintain an image of each individual ballot which is cast on the system, and to use a method of “storage location scrambling” so that the image of the ballot cast by the first voter using the system is not the first image to appear on a printout of the images.”

Remember the Bush-Gore 2000 presidential election? Voters’ intent was the key issue during a manual recount. Florida was too close to call. “Hanging chads” entered the lexicon. Did a partially punched chad count as a vote? Was only one corner removed or two? Did voters intend to vote for Bush or Gore? The nation’s highest court ruled that George W. Bush won Florida.

Photo credit: By Ben Schumin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link